Honestly, I can see the advantage of having a few IOT devices around. Controlling your heating system remotely could be useful for example so you don't needlessly heat up your house in the evening if you're stuck working late at work, or so you can turn the heating back on when traveling home from a holiday so you don't get home to a freezing cold house. The security risks however are always a concern.

However, Internet connected kettles and so much of the other crap out there are a step too far. Similarly, modern "smart" devices that you do not want connected to the net should *always* have the capability to be operated in a fully offline mode.

Trippynet wrote:Controlling your heating system remotely could be useful for example so you don't needlessly heat up your house in the evening if you're stuck working late at work

Not my house. It's isolated well enough that if I were to yank the plug from the heating system in the morning, by the time I get back from work ambient temperature has dropped a little over 1 degree celcius. Also the floor heating I have in the computer room benefits from continuous flow rather than bursts of heat.

In general I tend to buy quality for essential equipment in my house, and in return I expect it to last a long time. For example: my fire and burglary alarm system is without a doubt archaic by IoT standards, but it works and that's the only thing that really matters. I don't need no twitter enabled smoke detector if my kids die in a fire should the WLAN not work or batteries run out. My system is wired. But walls on this side of the planet are not made from cardboard but bricks and cement, so I wouldn't spend the cost and effort of burying cables in the walls for something with a life expectancy of 3 years.

IMHO, most IoT devices are just gimmicks.

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Having remote-control of the temperature makes little sense for us, either.

The issue in our area is the humidity, especially at night. We will have a dewpoint of 70°F, a high of 90 and a low of around 70. So if we have our tstat also set around 72°F then at night everything starts sweating because the AC doesn't need to run to keep things cool.

With a regular tstat we'll turn it up in the afternoon, and then gradually turn it down to bump on the AC occasionally to keep the humidity at bay.

So having the humidity sensor as well as the temperature sensor, plus some program-ability is great.

I have devices that control lighting, security cameras and power switching. They have internal APIs and sit on the non-routable network. I manipulate them through scripts I write and maintain myself. Here's an example: http://www.floodgap.com/software/huepl/

I was given a Nest as a gift from someone I told not to buy it for me as a gift because I don't trust them, but they did it anyway and I ended up quietly selling it. Fetched decent money, too.

ClassicHasClass wrote:I have devices that control lighting, security cameras and power switching. They have internal APIs and sit on the non-routable network. I manipulate them through scripts I write and maintain myself. Here's an example: http://www.floodgap.com/software/huepl/

Dude, this is BRIL! Now I'll hafta go out and expunge a bunch of bucks on one of these systems...

Project:Temporarily lost at sea...Plan:World domination! Or something...

In the old days of fixed frequency machines like Apple II, Atari 800, Commodore Amiga, once your code ran well enough you shipped it. That's because in those days the devices were plugged in to AC power and the customer paid for electricity. Today in the age of cloud computing where you the software provider are footing the bill for every clock cycle that your hosted software consumes, code quality matters a lot. Same with the other end of the spectrum with battery powered devices, saving clock cycles means extending battery life.